This page is meant to be a comprehensive site of free,
easily available economic time series data useful for economic research, in particular
economic forecasting. This site (set of web pages) was started in 1996 to help students in an
Applied Forecasting class. The idea was to give students easy access to large amounts of data,
and to be able to quickly get charts of that data. This is also useful during class, so that when we use
the computer and overhead projector facility in class, we can quickly retrieve series and do manipulations
in class.

At this time, there are more than 200,000 time series for which data and custom charts
can be retrieved.
Though the greatest utility of this site is the vast number of economic time series, and the
easily modified charts of that same data, an overlooked facility of
great utility is the availability of Excel files
for all series.

The majority of the data is USA data. The core data sets involve US macroeconomic data (that is, for the whole US),
but the bulk of the data is employment data by local area -- state, county, MSA, and many cities and towns.